Run, duck, and find cover! : Watch the best disaster movies
Whether it’s manmade disasters, epic natural phenomenon, or threats from outer space, this JustWatch streaming guide has you covered. Discover the best disaster movies, those that have flown under the radar, and find out where you can stream them right now. Regardless of your streaming platform preference you can find disaster movies from all the major providers including Netflix, Max, Paramount+, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+.
Use the JustWatch filters to narrow your search by IMDb rating so you can distinguish between the worst kind of disaster movies like Snakes on a Plane, and the highest-rated ones like Melancholia or Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Filter by release year and discover disaster movies through the ages, with 1970s classics such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. You can also filter by price, age rating and streaming platform.
The worst disasters (and best disaster movies) available to stream now
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, from the large cataclysmic world-ending events to local catastrophes that change just a few people forever. In Hitchcock's The Birds, an uncommon disaster strikes a town in Northern California when birds begin to attack people. James Cameron’s epic, Titanic, is one of the greatest disaster movies with the affected people on board a doomed ocean liner. Great sci-fi disaster movies threaten the whole planet, with Independence Day and War of the Worlds depicting a terrifying alien invasion, while 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow see Earth falling to the effects of climate change. Avoiding lethal meteor collision with the Earth is the plot of epic disaster movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, while Don’t Look Up cleverly subverts this premise.
Lesser-known disaster movies that must be seen to be believed
With so many big budget major studio disaster movies, it can be easy to miss the lesser known ones. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion focuses on a global pandemic that threatens the lives of everyone on the planet, while Deepwater Horizon is about the fallout from an exploding drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Society of the Snow is a Spanish-language movie about a plane crash that leaves the survivors stranded in the frozen Andes, while Twister displays the horrific impact that a tornado can have. Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure and Triangle of Sadness are two must-see disaster movies. Honourable Australian mentions include On The Beach, a 1959 apocalyptic drama starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire set in Melbourne and also These Final Hours, a thriller set in the aftermath of a meteor collision.
Discover other genres
Disaster movies often cross over with other genres such as movies based on true stories, for example The Impossible, which recounts a family trying to survive during a tsunami. Oftentimes, disaster movies also double as sci-fi dramas, with Apollo 13 being a prime example. Some giant monster movies can also be considered disaster movies with both Godzilla and King Kong being known for wreaking havoc on screen. The genre has also proven popular in the TV show format with shows such as Chernobyl, Fallout and Silo.
